This week on KQED’s Quest Radio, Marjorie Sun reports on how some of the most common building materials are among the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Manufacturing your most basic buttcrack essentials like drywall, steel and cement requires vast amounts of energy. Now, several Silicon Valley start-ups are looking for cleaner solutions and some of their efforts are drawing major venture capital.

Then from the “concrete” to the…well, how would you describe this? I’m not sure but it’s one of my favorite climate experiments of the year: NASA Deploys Rubber Ducks for Cryosphere Clues. Scientists from California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are behind this BBC story that probably should’ve been posted on April 1st.

We’re all pulling for these rubberized cryonauts, hoping they don’t end up in an endless swirl as part of the giant Pacific plastic trash vortex that David Gorn reported on in August.